Broken Clocks
by tridecagirl
Summary: Learning to turn back time isn't easy, but when you're in a broken timeline with no way out, you haven't got a choice.


Time travel has a learning curve.

You don't start right away. After you've buried the charred remains John's denizen left behind, after you've watched Jade's viewport dissolve into static with the notice 'connection lost' flashing across the screen, after you realize two of your friends are _dead_ and not coming back, both of you fall apart. Rose logs off for a few hours and comes back with fingers full of typos, so drunk you can practically smell the alcohol through the screen. You walk outside with a shitty broken sword and fight – slice hordes of imps into showers of grist, fell ogres like hulking mutant trees, even slash at steel I beams and churning gears until your blunted sword jars from your hand to the ground and you follow it. But once you've both finished your theatrical 'fuck yous' to a game that doesn't give a shit, you work things out. Hero of Time. Time travel. It's your job to fix things. Simple as that. There's a bright red RESET button with your face on it somewhere, and all you need to do is figure out how to press it.

After a few days of messing with alchemy, you've got something you think might work. Turntables – no, timetables – weird-ass floating disks that give off a low hum mostly in your own mind.

"Forward or back?" you ask. Another thing you've alchemized is a pair of computer shades that picks up your voice for you. Handy – you think your fingers would have fallen off by now from all the typing otherwise.

"Back," Rose advises you. "That's our goal, isn't it? Don't go all the way, though."

"I know." She's given you that lecture a thousand times and Seer knows best, after all. You set the tables spinning, there's a rushing noise in your ears, a feeling of suspended motion –

"Forward or back?" you ask.

"Back," Rose advises you. "That's our – wait."

"What?" You fiddle with one of the tables, frowning up at the sky in case she's got her viewport on. She's given you lectures a thousand times about being careful, but being careful isn't going to fix this game. If she's found another reason to stall, you swear –

"Don't go." Her voice, even filtered through speakers, is tight. "And, oh god."

"What the hell are you-?" you start, until you turn around. Then you see it, and it takes all your years of self-control to keep from throwing up.

It's you. Same clothes, same face, a cracked pair of turntables broken at your feet. Something has slashed you at waist level. You're almost in two pieces and spilling out your contents like a broken trashbag...

You lose the battle and throw up.

It looks like time travel is a little more complicated than you thought.

Eventually you learn the rules. With a Seer guiding you, you craft elegant stable loops reaching back and linking hands with each other, making sure you'll always come back home, making sure you'll stay alive.

You screw up plenty, too. You learn the shape of your heart, the arch of your spine, the curve of your ribcage. You know intimately what you look like burnt, broken, and torn apart. You could paint the colors of your insides without looking.

You don't give up. You want to, sometimes. But then you wake up screaming from dreams where you're running through the twisting passageways of Typheus's palace or bashing your palms helplessly against the computer screen and you can't help, it's not working, you need more_ time_. You remember the way John lay twisted and small and wrong when you found him, the look on Jade's face when the meteor was coming and you and Rose couldn't even hold her hand. You don't have a choice. You are the Knight of Time, and you will fix this, even if it kills you a thousand times.

The idea hits you one day when you're screaming at Calsprite, thinking it might be worth it to end up doomed and dying just so you won't have to deal with his shit anymore. You're making a note to warn your past self to prototype something else – anything else - before you get offed in whatever way Skaia dreams up, when it hits you. You message Rose, half enthusiastic, half horrified (it's a fucked up idea even in this game, and you're not sure you want it to work) and ask what she thinks.

"It might not save you," she says.

"I know that." You're sitting on one of the beams under your house, kicking your feet over lava and empty air. You've seen what that bubbling liquid can do to flesh and bone – corpse disposal method, can't leave dead Daves lying around, that shit's unhygienic, you 'd fail the FDA inspection for sure – and it looks painful. "But it might buy me some time. And hey, you said we should try to learn more about the game. Sprites are supposed to be the wise spirit guide who keeps you in line. I can go all Obi Wan Kenobi on that shit. Tell myself when I feel any disturbances in the force. Like if a thousand troll jackasses just screamed 'fuck you' and were suddenly silenced."

"Mine hasn't been very helpful," she says, not bothering to acknowledge your nightmare of a prototype.

"That's because you chucked in a dead cat. Seriously, what were you thinking? He could guide you to the best off brand tuna? Give you life advice in LOLZ Cat captions?"

She ignores you, and you imagine her biting her lip, trying to See back into the past's future or future's past or something equally twisted up and halfway nonexistent, working out whether this will save the game or fuck it up even more.

"It can't hurt," she eventually says.

As it turns out, it hurts a lot.


End file.
